The image of Athens as one of Europe’s safest capitals is threatened by a wave of lawlessness, misogyny, and extremism imported by recent immigrants, many of them from Muslim-majority countries, primarily from Pakistan. Local analysts say that the increased number of Muslim migrants poses serious threats to the safety of women and overall national security in the country of 10 million.
The sexual assault of a Greek woman by a mob of foreign-born Muslim men during the New Year’s celebration in Athens’s historic center, Syntagma Square, is just one of the episodes that indicate that the safety of women is under particular threat. Most of the participants of the celebration were men from Muslim-majority countries. The victims were, ironically enough, from a pro-Palestinian women’s group that calls itself “Purple,” reported the news website Mea Culpa. According to the report, the assault took place when women from the group raised a flag expressing solidarity with the Palestinians.
“Several men sexually assaulted a woman holding the banner,” Mea Culpa said. “At the same time, some tried to pull the banner out of her hand and one person punched her in the face and head.” This attack is clearly reminiscent of numerous mass sexual assaults (taharrush gamea) that have taken place several times in Cologne in 2016, Egypt in 2020, and Milan in 2022 and 2025. It is also similar to the abuse of young girls and women perpetrated by Pakistani immigrants in England over the course of several decades.
Proto Thema, a prominent Greek newspaper, reported in 2023 that immigrants from countries like Iraq, Pakistan, and Albania exhibit crime rates much higher than those of Greece’s native-born population. According to official police data, immigrants, who comprise only 10% of Greece’s population, accounted for more than 55% of those incarcerated in Greek prisons between January 1 and the end of October 2019. Ominously enough, out of the 92 arrests for rape during that time frame, 55 perpetrators were migrants and 37 were Greek nationals.
“We are talking about a more than tripling of foreign criminals in 15 years,” the report said. “If we look at the nationalities of the criminals, of the above, we find that Albanians consistently hold the lead. The rapid increase in the number of Pakistanis who commit criminal acts is striking.”
An estimated 150,000 Pakistanis (both legal and illegal migrants) currently reside in Greece, most of them in Athens, a city of 650,000. Police and media reports suggest that there is a correlation between the large number of Pakistani males and the uptick in sexual crimes.
The recent attack in Syntagma Square is in fact part of a larger phenomenon. In 2021, a pregnant woman, aged 25, was gang-raped in Athens by one Afghan and three Pakistani males. In another incident, a Pakistani man, also in Athens, raped an Indian woman, threatened to kill her, and recorded the crime on his mobile phone. This occurred last February. In the same month, another Pakistani man, accused of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy on the autism spectrum, was arrested in Athens.
And the list goes on: the cases we cited are only some of the gruesome sexual assaults against women and children (both locals and tourists) that take place on a regular basis in Greece.
“In one of the most shocking sexual crimes in Greece, back in 2012—the case of a 14-year-old child named Myrto, who was raped and then thrown over a cliff—the perpetrator was Pakistani,” Dimitrios Papageorgiou, an Athens-based journalist, told europeanconservative.com.
“The assault left the child permanently disabled. She was in a coma for several months after the attack,” he recalled. “That crime shocked Greek society, especially since one of his lawyers attempted to defend him by saying that this was a cultural phenomenon in Pakistan. Ever since, there have been several sexual crimes with Muslim perpetrators, but the mainstream media have not chosen to invest heavily in their coverage.”
Constantinos Bogdanos, journalist, publisher, and former member of Greek parliament, told europeanconservative.com:
Official numbers do not lie. Muslim communities in Greece, who have emerged after a decade of uncontrolled—if not state-sponsored—illegal immigration are on top of all charts regarding criminality, including sexual crimes. Nationals of countries like Pakistan are responsible for a disproportionately sizeable part of all crimes against women committed in Greece. So it is time to leave political correctness aside. This is a matter of culture. Many of those people believe that women are inferior to men and that they have a moral and religious right to abuse them. This should be unacceptable. Such people have no place in Greece.
Meanwhile, dozens of officials from Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency were implicated in human trafficking earlier this month by facilitating the movements of at least 4,000 Pakistanis to Greece via third countries, such as Egypt and Libya.
Paul Antonopoulos, the Athens-based reporter for the Greek City Times, who regularly covers migration-related issues, says: “Before the 2015 European migrant crisis, Athens was one of Europe’s safest capital cities, a status that has since been lost in the past decade.” According to him, the influx of migrants to Greece from 2015 onward, mostly from Pakistan and Afghanistan, “using the cover of the Syrian War to illegally enter the country,” has turned some of Athens’s neighborhoods into “no-go zones for women once the sun sets.”
Despite all this, Islamist activists have worked to make it easier for Pakistanis to come to Greece, Antonopoulos notes.
“Although Islamabad and human rights organizations try to justify the illegal migration of Pakistanis to Greece and Europe with the poverty and lack of opportunities in Pakistan (which is true), it [also furthers] an Islamist agenda,” he told this publication. “Pakistan has a literacy rate of less than 60 percent, with much of this literate population educated in madrassas rather than in public schools and radicalized.”
Antonopoulos warns that what happened in the United Kingdom is happening in Greece. In the UK, Antonopoulos observes, “the Pakistani community is emboldened to flood the streets with Islamic fervor and become a major voting bloc that can influence elections.”
The increase in the number of Pakistanis creates a larger base of support for Islamic extremism, Dimitrios Papageorgiou, the Athens-based journalist, told europeanconservative.com.
“In the past few years, Athens’s streets have seen numerous demonstrations by organizations based here that have links with extremist Islamists,” he said. “There have even been protests outside the Indian embassy in support of Islamist terrorists in Kashmir, in violation of diplomatic protocols. Those are organized by the Pakistani government.”
Islamabad has in fact used a heavy hand to organize its diaspora community, Papageorgiou reminded. “In Greece, their ‘communities’ are influenced by the various compartments of Pakistani power groups, whether they are political or religious,” he said. “In that sense, it is feared that these large numbers of immigrants are tools at the disposal of Pakistani policies abroad.”
Vasileios Grammenos, an MP of the opposition Hellenic Solution, echoes concerns about mass Islamic immigration into Greece.
“The lack of integration of Islamists targets the core of our civilization, as Turkish and Qatari Islamic scholars openly assert that they are planning to conquer Western societies through illegal migration and oppression of indigenous peoples. We, as Greeks, know very well how they operate. Whenever Islam becomes a solid part of a population, even as a minority, chaos, violence and genocide evolve,” he told this publication.
Dr. Marie-Athena Papathanasiou, an international lawyer who is researching legal issues on radicalization and extremism, told europeanconservative.com that “Greece must first make a clear distinction between legal and illegal migration.” According to her, the Greek government for the past 5 years has been granting asylum to almost anyone entering the country illegally without due controls and background checks.
“It is unsustainable and plainly wrong to grant asylum to economic migrants from Pakistan, Egypt and Bangladesh. Asylum is for refugees, not for economic migrants nor for abusive benefit seekers. Legal migration must be supported with matching skills and work prospects and the imported migrants should not all be from Muslim countries. Greece, for historic and geopolitical reasons, should not allow the buildup of a sizable Muslim minority,” she asserts.
But the Greek government still does not seem to be taking proper action. According to a report in the Greek media, in the first 29 days of the year 2025, a total of 760 migrants arrived in the Greek island of Crete from the coast of Libya. “If the migrant flows continue at this rate, then [mass migration occurring] this year may surpass all previous ones,” the report said.
